Visual Novel/Motion Comics

I've always liked the idea of telling stories in different ways, rather than sticking only to fully animated pieces or sequential still images. Motion comics sounds like a good balance between the two, but I've found most motion graphics to be boring, or distracting with the bits of animation they have (which often looks awkward and forced, since it is usually parts of a still image manipulated with After Effects rather than creating a comic to be animated). I've noticed a few 'motion comics' recently that have kept my interest, however.

 These are from visual novel games, which already use a mix of still images and animation, along with a lot of text to tell a story. Often they are more immersive than motion comics because they are interactive, often allowing the player choices, even if the story may still only follow on single story.



Above is a collection of the comics in the game Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, revealing how the murders in the game takes place. This relies on the narration of Naegi, the main character, to walk us through the comic as there are no text boxes involved or any kind or word-based narration in the comic. The animation in the panels do help to tell the story though, and I think that with a button or something to manually move the the next panel/page, someone could watch this story lay out quite easily without narration. This actually reminds me a little bit of an animatic, except that it uses panels moving next to each other rather than moving to the next frame. The panels moving along with the sound effects add a lot to the story, as well as the timing and placement of how the panels move. This seems like it could be simpler than making an animation or animatic than something, but with the sound effects being put to not only the animation but the panels, the panel placement, and the choice of what to animate inside each panel, this could possibly be harder than it looks to pull off.



The World Ends with You is another visual novel type game, but it involves real time combat and less decision making, with the comic cut scenes at certain parts of the story. The layout of panels are much more loose and creative as it tries to show the images as if they are thoughts and scenes that the main character is seeing and thinking about, rather than to illustrate to the viewer what is going on. There is a little bit more animation in parts of this than in Dangan Ronpa, but it isn't too fluid or concentrated on. This almost jerky animation goes with the design of the characters and music, and possibly works better than if it was fully animated, in my opinion. I've chosen a video with the Japanese dub to examine to see how well the scenes can be understood without narration in English over it. I think that the narration definitely works, but you can definitely understand the feel and atmosphere of each of the scenes from the colouring, panel speed/shape and content as it plays out. I feel like this would be easier to pull off than complete Dangan Ronpa style comic pages, but I think audio is much more important with this style of storytelling.